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About this project

We’re ready to make it! Auditorium 2: Duet is the sequel to Auditorium, the award-winning game that launched our company. If you're not familiar with Cipher Prime or our first game, play the original Auditorium demo, watch some gameplay videos, or check it out on Steam!

Duet will build faithfully on all the essential elements of the beloved original; players will still be creating music by bending dazzling rivers of light and color through brain-twisting puzzles. But it’s also going to be so much more. The last time around we invited you into our Auditorium. Now we want you all to come back and play together!

So What's the Sequel All About?

More Cooperation!

Auditorium 2: Duet will be a cooperative experience. To solve puzzles, you will need to coordinate with a partner to guide luminous motes to their proper destinations.

There will still be a single player mode, but the magic will take place in cooperative mode.

It’s going to be a thoughtful and intense experience where you must lean on each other’s intuition and planning to create a vividly pulsing colorscape. You’ll work together to overcome all the challenges we throw at you.

New Geometry & Controls!

Auditorium 2: Duet will feature multiple interactive playing fields. The addition of a partner is going to be accompanied by an expansion of the game space, meaning several interlinked playing fields. You control your own field, but your actions will affect your partner’s display. The real heart of the game will be found in managing these interactions harmoniously.

Networked Play!

Auditorium 2: Duet will allow for local and networked play. Aside from a separate single player campaign, we want you to be able to play locally with other people on the same network, as well as over the internet with friends from all over the world!

How Are You Going to Make the Game?

Auditorium was originally built in Flash, and was meant to be played in a web browser. This was awesome for getting lots of people everywhere to play our game, but Flash comes with its own set of performance limitations.

Auditorium Duet is going to be designed from the ground up as a standalone PC/Mac game, and we're building it with a powerful development tool called Unity. Rolling out a robust multiplayer game is going to take a lot of time and effort, and it’s more ambitious than any project we’ve worked on before. Where we go from there will depend on the game's final hardware requirements, the ease and speed with which we can make the game playable on other platforms, and user interest.

What Do You Need?

We are asking for $60,000, which will start a development period for Auditorium 2: Duet that will take a minimum of six months.

This will allow our studio of four people to work day and night on Auditorium 2: Duet for three to four months. If we can get that, we can cover the remainder of the development costs. We are jack-of-all-trades developers. We have to juggle marketing, accounting, legal issues, and customer support. If we're still awake afterward, we get to make games. That's all we really want to do--make awesome games for you.

A successful Kickstarter will primarily help us cover development of the game and overhead expenses for the company. This is our first multiplayer game, meaning there will be more complex development and testing than usual. We'll need the proper hardware, software tools, and software licenses necessary to make sure that the game looks and sounds incredible, and runs smoothly on different machines.

Donations will also help cover the sundry costs of running a company. We normally do all the design and music for our games in house, but being able to hire outside expertise if needed will free up our resources and really jumpstart the development process.

We are essentially asking for our fans and backers to give us the opportunity to focus entirely on a game that we all want, without needing to worry about whether our company can stay afloat. Anything we get above our target will go right back into the game--more game depth, more platforms, more creative flourishes.

How This Kickstarter Makes Duet Possible

For those of you unfamiliar with Kickstarter, this website is a fundraising platform for creative projects. Developers describe what they want to create, set a monetary goal, decide on a deadline for the fundraiser, and offer rewards for certain levels of donations. No money is actually transferred unless the monetary goal is met and the fundraising period has ended.

We are a small independent game company. The only reason we exist today is because when we were developing Auditorium, we put a Donations button on our website, and people were generous enough to support it.

After Auditorium, we relied on publishers' advances and contract work to keep the company running. We also made Pulse and Fractal, but it's been a rocky road, especially without guaranteed income. But we know we can be doing so much more for our fans. This time we want to cut out the middlemen and take the development process straight from the fans to our company and back.

Thank You Everyone!

Auditorium 2: Duet is a dream game for us, and we hope that our past record of polish and creativity in games gives you reason to believe in its potential as well. We want to throw everything we have into this game, but we need this Kickstarter to ensure that we can keep everything together in the process.

Finally, we just want to thank all the Cipher Prime fans, both present and future. Whether or not this Kickstarter pans out, just know that your support and your kind words over the past few years have really made running this company an incredible experience for us. We know you all will keep being awesome, and you can be sure we'll keep making games!

But it would be totally awesome if Kickstarter started this party, so be sure talk about Auditorium Duet! Tell your friends about it! Tweet! Update your Facebook status! Sing from the rooftops! Every word helps us out more than you can imagine. We love you!

And because we think that Brian Fargo's Kicking It Forward movement is awesome idea, we want to make the Kicking It Forward pledge! We solemnly pledge 5% of the profits from the finished product back to the Kickstarter community to help fund other people's dreams! Check out the site for more info! http://kickingitforward.org/

FAQ

Short answer: If the Kickstarter is successful, we'll have to wait and see if sales of the game will cover development costs for mobile development. If the Kickstarter is VERY successful, we would be able to consider those things from the start.

Longer answer: If the project does super well, porting the game to mobile platforms is an immediate priority after getting the base game developed on PC/Mac. Our development tool makes it easier to deploy games on mobile platforms (much more so than the original Auditorium), but there is a significant amount of time and expense involved in optimization, testing, and tweaking.

We want to make Auditorium Duet as good as it can be on the desktop, and be sure we can get the multiplayer experience down pat before we start experimenting on mobile platforms.

For international shipping, if you are outside of the U.S. and are receiving the t-shirt, print, or plaque, please add $10 to your pledge, and then we'll cover the difference. If your pledge is already $10 over your reward level, you're good to go.

Before our first update, those reward levels had different rewards. We changed things around to reflect user feedback and suggestions, so those older levels should be locked. However, Kickstarter policies require us to keep the old ones up, but you can safely ignore the old panels!

Rewards

Pledge $5 or more

A huge "Thank You" and your name will be listed in the credits of Auditorium Duet.

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $15 or more

859 backers

You get a finished copy of Auditorium 2: Duet for PC/Mac. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $20 or more

61 backers
All gone!

You get a finished copy of Auditorium 2: Duet for PC/Mac. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $20 or more

102 backers

A PDF guide with strategies and solutions for all of Auditorium Duet's acts, in both single-player and multiplayer playlists. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $30 or more

10 backers
All gone!

Exclusive Dev Note Access, which will include frequent progress reports and the ability to comment on the development of Auditorium Duet. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Apr 2012

You selected

Pledge $30 or more

171 backers

An exclusive Auditorium Duet T-shirt, as well as exclusive Dev Note Access, which will include frequent progress reports and the ability to comment on the development of Auditorium Duet. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Apr 2012

You selected

Pledge $30 or more

243 backers

The Duet Pack! You get an extra copy of the completed game! It is a game meant for two, after all! Feel free to gift the extra copy to any of your friends and family. You also get Dev Note Access. (Note that you only get the $30 T-shirt reward or the $30 extra game reward, but each does include the reward tiers above $30.)

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $50 or more

184 backers

Backers at this level get a custom Supporter Edition of Auditorium 2 : Duet with a special single-player Act and multiplayer Act. You'll be able to play these sets of levels with friends on release and show your promoter status. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $80 or more

103 backers

A full-length mp3 soundtrack to Auditorium Duet, plus the accompanying sheet music in pdf format. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $100 or more

53 backers

Become an official Beta Tester and get a chance to help shape the game in it's infancy. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:May 2012

You selected

Pledge $125 or more

2 backers
All gone!

An exclusive Auditorium Duet T-Shirt. Design still under consideration. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Jun 2012

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Pledge $125 or more

36 backers

A framed print. These will be high quality prints of either the gameplay or concept art. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $200 or more

35 backers

You will receive a custom hand-made Duet Supporter Plaque! Optional: we will put your photograph alongside your name in the credits in a very cool way. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $500 or more

3 backers

$500 dollars? Really? Who can give out this much money? This is so unbelievable that anyone who gives us $500 won't get anything special except for a mega-thanks and all the reward tiers below. But really, $500? That's crazy! If you're ever in Philly though, let us know and Dain Xavier Saint will make himself available to give you an hour long massage. He's done some amateur masseuse-ing on the side, and he works hard for his money. This will be followed by tea and a meal with the tea, all prepared and cooked by Mr. Saint himself, who is also an amateur chef. Then, post-dinner entertainment will incude a brief juggling show performed by Mr. William Stallwood with piano accompaniment by Dain X. Saint, who is no amateur pianist. Optional: you can then hang out and play Starcraft with us, no matter what league you're in (we're only silver).

Estimated delivery:Apr 2012

You selected

Pledge $1,000 or more

1 backer
Limited (4 left of 5)

A custom one-of-a-kind print, designed by Will Stallwood, OR a custom song, composed by Dain Saint. They will work with the backers to select a theme or inspiration for the final design or composition. Plus the above rewards!

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

You selected

Pledge $2,000 or more

1 backer
Limited (1 left of 2)

Okay, aside from being immensely grateful to you, let's be completely honest here: you probably don't need cool swag if you can give us $2,000. What we'll do instead is stroke your ego. We'll skillfully photoshop your face onto a portrait of any artistic milieu you like (Renaissance? Impressionist? Cubist?), make a large wall poster print of it, and then frame it. And then it will grace the walls of the Cipher Prime Studios from now until the end of time.

Estimated delivery:Oct 2012

Funding period

Feb 28, 2012 - Mar 30, 2012
(31 days)

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